In the legal case of U.S. AWOL soldier André Shepherd, the European
Court of Justice Advocate General, Eleanor Sharpton, ruled that
those endangered by
prosecution or punishment for refusal to perform military service involving an
illegal war or committal of war crimes, should be protected by the European
Union. This is a best-case situation for André heading into his asylum hearing.

Rudi Friedrich of Connection
e.V. (Germany) stated, "Should the European Union Court of Justice
respect the Advocate General's final opinion, the position in asylum cases of
military service refusers and deserters will be significantly reinforced.

André Shepherd, upon reading Sharpton's decision, "The final opinion gives me
new reason for optimism, both in my own case, and for the rights of other
deserters."

Tomas Young (1979-2014)

Iraq war veteran and outspoken Iraq war critic Tomas Young has died at the age of 34.

Tomas Young enlisted in the Army
following the September 11 attacks,
volunteering to go to Afghanistan. He was sent to Iraq in 2004, and was
left
paralyzed by a bullet on the fifth day of his deployment. In 2008, he
explained that "many of us volunteered with patriotic feelings in our
heart, only
to see them subverted and bastardized by the administration and sent
into the wrong country."

Young was the subject of the award-wining documentary Body of War by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro.

Last year, Tomas read a letter to
Bush and Cheney which read in part: "You may evade justice but in our eyes
you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of
murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans — my
fellow veterans — whose future you stole."

Photo by Jeff Paterson. Tomas Young traveled to Crawford, Texas in an attempt to challenge
President Bush on the Iraq War. August 29, 2005.

Sara is a single mother and Iraq
war veteran. She is being held in the civilian county jail prior to her
military trial. Sara went AWOL a second time last summer after a nearly
year-long delay in resolving the original charge that resulted when she
left her unit at Ft. Hood in January, 2007.

Just over one year ago, September 14, 2013, Beining was stopped for a
traffic offense and held on an outstanding military warrant, more than
six years after she and her newlywed husband had together walked away
from war service. She was briefly jailed, then given a plane ticket and
orders to report back to Fort Carson, Colorado, where, she said, “I
tried for another year to play the game” and be quietly processed out of
the army as many other recent military refusers have been. But in her absence without leave, Beining had given birth to a
daughter in September, 2008 and become an outspoken opponent of war.

Courage to Resist

484 Lake Park Ave. #41

Oakland, CA 94610

510-488-3559

couragetoresist.org

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Occupation, Repression, and Strategies of Resistance from the US to Palestine:A Night of Music, Food, and Conversation to Support the Case of Rasmea Odeh

This
is a crucial time to come to Rasmea's defense. Please-mark your
calendar, and spread the word widely about this upcoming Fundraiser to
Support the Defense of Rasmea Odeh.

The political trial
of Palestinian American activist Rasmea Odeh has reached a critical
point. Odeh is the founder of the Arab Women's Committee in Chicago, a
grassroots collective that promotes leadership among Arab immigrant
women. The US government has accused her of omitting an answer on her
citizenship application 10 years ago. Odeh, who was sexually tortured
into a false confession by Israel and served a decade in Israeli
prisons, faces revocation of her citizenship, imprisonment, and
deportation.

Last week, Judge Gershwin Drain ruled
that, although Odeh's account of the torture and forced confession were
"credible," they were not admissible as evidence. This casts a dark
shadow on her chances of receiving a fair trial. We will have the latest
news on her trial, which begins November 4th.

In the words of a letter of protest by more than 100 feminist scholars:
Rasmea's
story encompasses some of the most urgent feminist struggles of our
times-violence against women and the use of sexual violence as a tool of
colonization and war; the impact of racism and anti-immigrant policies
upon women; the criminalization of women of color; and the use of
intimidation to thwart feminist activism.

info@araborganizing.org | 415.861.7444

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Rasmea Defense Committee statement

Without a full and fair trial,
Rasmea found guilty

In
a travesty of justice, Rasmea Odeh today was found guilty of one count
of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization. For over a year, Rasmea, her
supporters, and her legal team have been battling this unjust government
prosecution, saying from the start that the immigration charge was
nothing but a pretext to attack this icon of the Palestine liberation
movement. And although there is real anger and disappointment in the
jury’s verdict, it was known as early as October 27th that she would not
get a full and fair trial.

On that day, Judge Gershwin
Drain made a number of rulings that made her defense virtually
impossible. The government’s indictment stated that she had unlawfully
gained U.S. citizenship because she had allegedly answered a number of
questions falsely on her visa application in 1995 and her naturalization
application in 2004. She had been in this country as a lawful permanent
resident for almost 20 years, and a citizen for over nine, when she was
arrested on October 22nd, 2013.

The main basis for the
arrest a year ago was that she had allegedly falsely answered “No” to a
question asking whether she had ever been arrested or imprisoned. The
government claimed that she failed to disclose that she had been
convicted by the Israelis of participating in bombings in 1969. This
conviction in a military court was the result of a false confession made
after she was viciously tortured and raped by Israeli military
authorities for weeks. There is no due process in Israeli military
courts, which “convict” over 99% of Palestinians who come before them,
and “evidence” from these should not be accepted in a court in the U.S.

But
Judge Drain did allow the conviction in Israel to be entered into
evidence; and even though he suggested that Rasmea’s assertion that she
faced torture and sexual abuse at the hands of her Israeli captors was
“credible,” he still ruled that it could not be brought up in the course
of her trial. So her attorneys had to scrap plans to call to the stand
an expert witness, clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Fabri, who has decades
of experience working with torture survivors, to testify that the
allegedly false answers on the immigration forms were the result of
Rasmea’s chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The
judge also rejected Rasmea’s selective prosecution motion, even though
it was clear that the case against her grew out of the investigation of
23 anti-war and Palestinian community organizers in Chicago and
Minneapolis, who were subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in 2010. Make
no mistake. Rasmea came under attack by the U.S. government because she
is Palestinian, and because for decades, she has organized for
Palestinian liberation and self-determination, the Right of Return, and
an end to U.S. funding of Israeli occupation. Palestine support work,
especially the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, has made a
number of recent gains, and the long arm of federal law enforcement has
attempted to crack down on it, like it has on all effective and
impactful movements for social justice in the history of this country.
The crackdown reached Rasmea.

More than 200 people from
across the Midwest, especially from Chicago, traveled to stand with her
throughout the trial. They bore silent witness to her incredible
testimony, for despite the judge’s rulings, she and her defense team did
put the crimes of Israel on record. Her story of being exiled from the
village of her birth, Lifta, in 1948; of being exiled again during the
1967 war; of experiencing the death of her sister after the raid on her
home in 1969; and of being a political prisoner, one of the most famous
in the history of the Palestine liberation movement—all these are
stories of the crimes of apartheid Israel, crimes that continue today in
the racist settler and military assaults we have seen in the Gaza
Strip, Jerusalem, 1948 Palestine, and the West Bank. Israel’s terrorism,
and the U.S. government’s complicity, were exposed for all the world to
see.

Rasmea’s honesty in the face of cross-examination
from Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Tukel was thoroughly convincing
as well. She said clearly that she thought the questions on the
immigration forms were being asked about her time in the U.S., because
she said she had nothing to hide and did not need to lie. She had
testified about her torture at the United Nations when she was released
in 1979, and as her lead attorney, Michael Deutsch, said, “It was well
known that she was convicted, and traded [in a prisoner exchange]. The
U.S. Embassy knew it, the State Department knew it, and Immigration
should have known it.” So although the government had to prove that she
“knowingly lied,” it never met that burden, regardless of what the
verdict says.

For over a year, the Rasmea Defense
Committee has been organizing educational events, rallies, protests, and
call-in days to demand that U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade and Tukel
drop the charges against her. We now have more work ahead of us.
Rasmea’s brilliant legal team—Deutsch, Jim Fennerty, Bill Goodman, and
Dennis Cunningham—will undoubtedly file an appeal, and have strong
grounds to do so, based on Judge Drain’s unjust decisions. And we will
continue to support their work with our political organizing and
mobilizations.

Just like our people in Palestine and
across the world will never rest until every inch of historical
Palestine is free, we will never rest in our defense and support of
Rasmea as she moves forward to challenge this conviction. As Deutsch
said in his closing statement to the jury, “It has been one of the great
privileges of my long legal career to represent this extraordinary
woman of great passion and dignity.” Rasmea’s story is the story of
millions of Palestinians, and of millions of freedom-loving defenders of
justice everywhere. Her eventual victory will be a victory for
Palestine and for all the people’s movements across the world.

Today,
we thank everyone who stood with Rasmea this past year, and ask you to
continue fighting with us until we achieve that victory.

At
Trial and Direct Appeal while two Innocent men’s lives were at stake,
Attorney General Christopher Abruzzo knowingly introduced false
testimony and let false testimony go uncorrected from the Trial Court,
all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court that relied on said testimony.
From there the Attorney General's office introduced this evidence in
Federal Court's: District Court, the Third Circuit and the U.S. Supreme
Court, knowing that said testimony was false, misleading and untrue.

The
false misleading and untrue testimony introduced in all stages of my
appeal process led to the Summary Reversal of the Third Circuit
Dismissal of my case.

At all times the prosecution, in it's own file
dating back from 1995 had knowledge and evidence showing that the
arguments and claims presented at court was false and THEY "NEVER"
corrected it to this date. …

The evidence recently
released from the files of the Attorney General's office shows
conclusively that the findings of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals was
correct, rightful and legally sound and based on a true reading of the
evidence. That the evidence was indeed Insufficient and if the recently
released files were available to trial counsel, I would have been
quickly found Innocent. What do you think?
“The Pain Within”

Hundreds
of people marched in anger late Saturday to the Presidential Palace in
Mexico’s capital after the government announced that the 43 students who
disappeared seven weeks ago in the state of Guerrero have been
murdered.

A political crisis is unfolding for Peña
Nieto’s government, who has done nothing to stem the wave of murders and
remained silent for weeks in this latest massacre.

The Bay Area stands in solidarity with the people of Mexico. We demand:
Resignation of the EPN government
End to the Narco-government
End to State/Drug Cartel Repression
US Out of Mexico

Send a message in order to add your group to the list of supporters.

Patrocinado por/Sponsored by:
ANSWER Coalition
The Kenneth Harding Jr. Foundation
La Misión de Martin Baro Proyecto de Transformación.
Left Party
Party for Socialism and Liberation - PSL
Workers World Party
Yo Soy 132 Bay Area

Today the Abolitionist Law Center, Amistad Law Project, and the
Roderick
& Solange MacArthur Justice Center are filing a historic
lawsuit in Federal Court on behalf of Prison Radio, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Educators for Mumia, and other plaintiffs. We seek to overturn a new PA
Law designed to allow the state to silence targeted prisoners by
preventing their speech.

What is at stake is your right
to hear Mumia and other prisoners, journalists right to record, and
prisoners right to speak. As a puppet for the agenda of the Fraternal
Order of Police, and to add to his poll numbers, PA Governor Tom Corbett
signed SB508 into law on 10/21, (effective immediately), and
specifically targeting Mumia Abu-Jamal's right to free speech.

The
law puts Prison Radio, our correspondents, and our listeners in
jeopardy. So in response we have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in
the middle district of PA (Harrisburg).

We will win this lawsuit.
We will continue to record Mumia.
We can uphold all prisoners’ rights to speak their truth.
But we need your help to do it.

07
November 2014 — An outrageous new law threatening the free speech of
convicts has been passed in Pennsylvania in a lightning fast process.
The chief target of this law? Innocent political prisoner Mumia
Abu-Jamal, and others like him. The perpetrators of this law? The
Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and their lap-dog friends in the state
legislature and governor’s mansion of PA. The victims of this law?
Convicts like Mumia; non-profits that distribute the writings and speech
of convicts; and ultimately the working class and all who oppose this
racist, capitalist system.

The new law, the
“Re-victimization Relief Act,” enables crime victims—as well as local
authorities and the state, using taxpayer funds—to sue any imprisoned
convict whose conduct “perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on
the victim,” ie, causes “mental anguish.” This broad and subjective
definition could mean anything!

PA Governor: Convicts Have No Rights

This
law was hashed together, and quickly passed and signed in reaction to a
pre-recorded commencement address to a Goddard College graduating class
by Mumia Abu-Jamal, himself a graduate of Goddard College. Mumia’s
inspiring address at Goddard said absolutely nothing about his case, yet
cops protested at the college entrance; and days later the law was
signed by PA Governor Corbett in a ceremony at 13th and Locust in
Philadelphia, the spot where Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot to
death—by someone other than Mumia—in 1981. Corbett said that “convicted
felons in prison have abused and surrendered their rights,” a blatantly
false assertion.

Protestors shouted “free Mumia,” and
“one-term Tom” at the Governor, which is what he turned out to be after
losing his seat in the recent mid-term elections. But the threatening
law he signed continues to menace convicts.

“Mumia Bill” Designed to “Shut Him Up”

This
new law is just the latest manifestation of the blatant targeting of
Mumia, by the very cops, courts and politicians who put him away for a
crime he didn’t commit in the first place. Called the “Mumia Bill,” this
act was designed to “shut him up” (Philly.com, 07.Oct.2014). It follows
a long line of “Mumia rules,” in which courts have literally changed
precedent when considering Mumia’s case, only to change back again on
other cases later. Will this blatantly unconstitutional law get
overturned, or will it be allowed to stand as yet another “Mumia rule,”
in defiance of all precedent? We cannot take that chance!

Mumia’s
case is just the immediate pretext for this legal atrocity. The danger
here is that this blatantly unconstitutional law could have far-reaching
effects, even if it does eventually get overturned. What about radio
stations such as the Pacifica Network, and non-profit organizations such
as Prison Radio, which promote the defense cases, and distribute the
writings of Mumia and other convicts, wrongfully convicted or
otherwise? They all have the right of free speech!

Lawyers
with the Abolitionist Law Center and the Amistad Law Project have
joined with Prison Radio (publishers of Mumia’s commentaries) to mount
an aggressive defense against this vindictive, so-called “legal”
challenge to the right of free speech. These folks need you help!

— Donate Now To Defeat PA’s Prisoner Gag Law —

Go to: http://bit.ly/defendfreespeech

Mumia
has been definitively shown to be innocent of the 1981 crime for which
he was convicted. He was the victim of an orchestrated frame-up by cops
and prosecutors, who were not only targeting a known leftist and former
Black Panther, and not only covering up their own rampant corruption in
Philadelphia’s inner city; but they were also covering their probable
complicity in the execution of one of their own, who was talking to the
Feds about the corruption at the time.

The system has
chickened out of trying to execute Mumia, since the evidence of his
innocence is so overwhelming. But they’ve confined him to state prison
for life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). Our job remains
unchanged: Mumia is Innocent! For labor action to free Mumia!

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Pennsylvania
legislators are trying to stop prisoners from speaking about their
ideas and experiences. Last week, PA Representative Mike Vereb
introduced a bill (HB2533) called the “Revictimization Relief Act,”
which would allow victims, District Attorneys, and the Attorney General
to sue people who have been convicted of “personal injury” crimes for
speaking out publicly if it causes the victim of the crime “mental
anguish.”

The bill was written in response to political
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s commencement speech at Goddard College, and
is a clear attempt to silence Mumia and other prisoners and formerly
incarcerated people. We believe that this legislation is not actually an
attempt to help victims, but a cynical move by legislators to stop
people in prison from speaking out against an unjust system.

While
to us this seems like a clear violation of the first amendment,
unfortunately the PA General Assembly doesn’t appear to agree, and they
have fast-tracked the bill for approval and amended another bill (SB508)
to include the same language. The legislation could be voted on as
early as Wednesday.

If this bill passes, it will be a
huge blow to the movement against mass incarceration. People inside
prisons play a leading role in these struggles, and their perspectives,
analysis, and strategies are essential to our work. Incarcerated and
formerly incarcerated people who write books, contribute to newspapers,
or even write for our Voices from the Inside section would run the risk
of legal consequences just for sharing their ideas.

That’s
why we are asking you to take action TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 by calling
Pennsylvania lawmakers to tell them that prisoners should not be denied
the right to speak.

Please call your legislators and
demand that they vote NO on HB2533 and SB508. You can look up contact
information at
http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.

We are also asking folks to call the following Senate leaders and ask them to stop the bill from moving forward:

Senate Majority Whip Pat Browne (717) 787-1349

Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams (717) 787-5970

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (717) 787-4712

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (717) 787-7683

Not sure what to say on the phone? Click here for a sample call script.

Want to write a letter to your legislators, or looking for more talking points? Click here for more info!

- See more at: http://decarceratepa.info/freespeech#sthash.TtdN3AkI.dpuf

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*Medical Care Needed for Chelsea Manning!ACLU files lawsuit against Army demanding medical care for ManningBy the Chelsea Manning Support Network

Yesterday,
the ACLU and Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit against the Army demanding
the necessary medical treatment for Manning’s previously diagnosed
gender dysphoria.

Due
to a full year of neglecting Manning’s medical care, the ACLU had
previously announced a Sept 4th deadline for the Army to provide
treatment. After continued failure to provide treatment, the ACLU filed a
lawsuit yesterday and released the following statement:

WASHINGTON—Today,
Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit in federal court in the District of
Columbia against Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and other Department
of Defense (DOD) and Department of the Army officials for their failure
to provide necessary medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, a
condition with which she was originally diagnosed by Army doctors more
than four years ago.

The
complaint is accompanied by a motion for preliminary injunction
demanding that Ms. Manning be provided hormone therapy, permission to
follow female grooming standards, and access to treatment by a medical
provider qualified to treat her condition. Ms. Manning is currently
serving a thirty-five year prison sentence at the United States
Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth Kansas, and though the military
recognizes that she has gender dysphoria requiring treatment, critical
care has been withheld without any medical basis.

“The
government continues to deny Ms. Manning’s access to necessary medical
treatment for gender dysphoria, without which she will continue to
suffer severe psychological harms,” said Chase Strangio, attorney in the
ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms.
Manning’s case. “Such clear disregard of well-established medical
protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

Ms.
Manning is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital, the ACLU of Kansas and civilian
defense counsel David E. Coombs. Last month, Ms. Manning’s legal team
sent a letter to the DOD and Army officials demanding that she receive
treatment for gender dysphoria in accordance with medical standards of
care, including hormone therapy and permission to follow female grooming
standards. Her treatment needs have continued to be unmet and her
distress has escalated.

“I am
proud to be standing with the ACLU behind Chelsea on this very important
issue.” said David E. Coombs, “It is my hope that through this action,
Chelsea will receive the medical care that she needs without having to
suffer any further anguish.”

Gender
dysphoria is a serious medical condition that requires hormone therapy
and changes to gender expression, like growing hair, to live
consistently with one’s gender identity as part of accepted standards of
care.

Without necessary
treatment, gender dysphoria can cause severe psychological distress,
anxiety, and suicidality. For this reason, the National Commission on
Correctional Health Care and the American Psychological Association have
issued policy statements that support providing treatment to prisoners
diagnosed with the condition in accordance with established standards of
care, as the Federal Bureau of Prisons and many state corrections
agencies are already doing.

5) A Claim of Innocence Is No Longer a Roadblock to Parole
“'Parole commissioners, like the rest of society, have come to recognize
that there are far more innocent people in prison than we had ever
imagined, so they’re more receptive to that argument,' said Ron Kuby, a
civil rights lawyer who represents Mr. Moses."

The Brazilian police killed more than 11,000 people from 2009 to 2013,
for an average of six killings a day, a public safety organization said
Tuesday in a report. The study by the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety,
which is based in São Paulo, said police officers nationwide had killed
11,197 people over the past five years, while law enforcement agents in
the United States had killed 11,090 people over the past 30 years. “The
empirical evidence shows that Brazilian police make abusive use of
lethal force to respond to crime and violence,” the report said.

Teachers and students protesting the abduction and apparent murder of 43
college students in September set fire Tuesday to the headquarters of
President Enrique Peña Nieto’s
party in Guerrero State. The protesters, who clashed with the police
over several hours, at one point detained the state security chief but
later released him. A number of demonstrations have erupted since
Friday, when federal officials said they had found burned remains that
may be those of the missing students. Witnesses have told the
authorities that the students were abducted by the police and turned
over to a drug gang that killed them.

WELDON
SPRING, Mo. — Gov. Jay Nixon said Tuesday that the Missouri National
Guard was part of a multiforce contingency plan by law enforcement
authorities to avert violence as the region around St. Louis awaited a
grand jury’s return in the death of Michael Brown three months ago.

“The
Guard will be available when we determine it is necessary to support
local law enforcement,” Mr. Nixon announced in a news conference at a
state highway patrol headquarters here, standing beside law enforcement
leaders from the St. Louis area. “Quite simply, we must and will be
fully prepared.”In August, Mr. Nixon called up the National Guard in the
sometimes violent protests that followed the death of Mr. Brown, an
unarmed black teenager fatally shot by a white police officer in
Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. The role of the Guard then was limited
to protecting a police command post, but it drew harsh criticism from
demonstrators who said it was more a sign of a military-style approach
by the authorities. On Tuesday, some demonstrators criticized Mr.
Nixon’s newest plan — and the possibility that he would call up the
Guard again — as an overreaction that might only heighten potential
anger.

Yet as the St. Louis area braces for a grand jury decision
expected later this month on whether the officer, Darren Wilson, will
be indicted in the killing, Mr. Nixon struck a firm, unapologetic tone
about police plans. “As governor, the most important part of my job is
keeping the people of Missouri safe,” Mr. Nixon said, ticking down a
list of incidents that had occurred in August, and drawing a distinction
between types of protesters — peaceful and not.

“In the days
immediately following Michael Brown’s death, peaceful protests were
marred by senseless acts of violence and destruction,” he said. “Vandals
smashed the windows of small businesses. Criminals looted and set fire
to stores. Gunshots and Molotov cocktails endangered citizens exercising
their First Amendment rights and law enforcement attempting to maintain
peace. That ugliness was not representative of Missouri, and it cannot
be repeated.”

Mr. Brown’s death led to months of demonstrations
and made Ferguson the focus of a national debate about race and police
procedures. Among some in Ferguson, there is an expectation that the
officer will not face serious charges. Mr. Nixon emphasized that,
whatever the finding of the grand jury, he was not convinced that
violence would occur but was obliged to prepare for the possibility.

To
that end, three large police agencies in the area — the St. Louis
County police, the St. Louis city police and the Missouri State Highway
patrol — will operate under a unified command system. Leaders from all
of them appeared beside the governor on Tuesday afternoon, though police
officers from the beleaguered Ferguson department were not seen there,
nor was their role in the handling of possible protests mentioned.

Some
of the larger departments have purchased new riot gear, undergone
thousands of hours of additional training and met with community,
schools and religious leaders. State officials have provided the three
departments with new communications equipment so they can coordinate
their responses. And the officers were prepared to work extended hours
and cancel vacations.

Mr. Nixon, a Democrat and a former state
attorney general, is in his second term as governor and barred by term
limits from seeking re-election. He drew sharp criticism by some for the
shift of authority in the handling of events in Ferguson in the days
after Mr. Brown’s death Aug. 9.

On Tuesday, he said that the
state would operate this time on two core principles: “keeping the
public safe while allowing people to speak.”

“This is America,”
Mr. Nixon said. “People have a right to express their views and
grievances. But they do not have the right to put their fellow citizens
or their property at risk.”

WASHINGTON
— A treaty ban on cruel treatment will restrict how the United States
may treat prisoners in certain places abroad, the Obama administration
is expected to tell the United Nations on Wednesday, according to
officials.

That interpretation would change a disputed Bush administration theory
that the cruelty ban does not apply abroad. But the Obama
administration also stopped short of an unequivocal acceptance that the
ban imposes legal obligations everywhere that American officials have a
prisoner in their custody or control, as humanrightsadvocates had urged it to say.

An
American delegation will unveil the administration’s position in Geneva
on Wednesday in a presentation before the United Nations Committee
Against Torture. The panel, which monitors compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture, has asked whether the United States still takes the Bush-era view.

Most
of the torture treaty contains no geographic limitations. But its ban
on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” that falls short of torture
is one of several provisions that apply to a state’s conduct “in any
territory under its jurisdiction.” That phrase is ambiguous, and the
administration of President George W. Bush took the view that the ban did not apply beyond domestic soil.

The
Obama administration, after an internal debate that has drawn global
scrutiny, is taking the view that the cruelty ban applies wherever the
United States exercises governmental authority, according to officials
familiar with the deliberations. That definition, they said, includes
the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and American-flagged ships
and aircraft in international waters and airspace.

But the administration’s definition still appears to exclude places like the former “black site”
prisons where the C.I.A. tortured terrorism suspects during the Bush
years, as well as American military detention camps in Afghanistan and
Iraq during the wars there. Those prisons were on the sovereign
territory of other governments; the government of Cuba exercises no
control over Guantánamo.

The latest debate began about five weeks
ago, when State Department lawyers sent a roughly 70-page memo to the
interagency lawyers group proposing that the administration take a
broader view of the treaty. But military and intelligence lawyers said
that they needed more time to examine whether changing the
interpretation of the treaty would affect operations.

Officials
emphasized that the debate was not about whether to use torture or
“cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” that falls short of torture. The
abuse of prisoners is already barred by domestic statutes and by the Geneva Conventions.

Rather,
they said, the debate was a technical matter of interpretation,
underlined by concerns that changing the jurisdictional scope could have
unintended consequences, like increasing the risk of lawsuits by
overseas detainees or making it harder to say that unrelated treaties
with similar jurisdictional language did not apply in the same places.

Still, the debate has been fraught with symbolic overtones. After The New York Times reported
that the administration was considering whether to accept or reject the
Bush-era interpretation, several human rights groups, a group of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, and Harold Koh, the top State Department lawyer in Mr. Obama’s first term, publicly urged rejection of the Bush-era view.

And a group of Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick J. Leahy and Richard J. Durbin, wrote in a joint letter,
“It is crucial that the United States signals to the world that we have
to put the dark chapter of the Bush administration’s torture program
behind us, and are not seen as attempting to leave open the possibility
of using so-called enhanced interrogation techniques ever again.”

The
administration is also taking a nuanced approach to the related
question of whether the Convention Against Torture is displaced by the
laws of war in armed conflicts. Its theory, developed for the
presentation this week in Geneva, says that both bodies of law apply at
the same time to wartime prisons, but if a situation arose in which they
clashed, the laws of war would trump because they are more specialized
for that situation.

The
Bush administration unveiled its narrow geographic interpretation of
the treaty’s cruelty ban in 2005, amid the fallout from the Abu Ghraib
scandal and the leaking of memos permitting the C.I.A. to use
waterboarding and other torture techniques. It dovetailed with others
ways the Bush legal team interpreted anti-torture laws narrowly and also
claimed that a president’s wartime powers could trump them.

The
disclosure prompted bipartisan outrage, and Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, proposed a bill to close the legal loophole and
make clear that the cruelty ban applied everywhere. During the debate
over that legislation in 2005, Barack Obama, a senator at the time, endorsed the view that Mr. McCain’s bill merely echoed “existing obligations” under the treaty.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

5) A Claim of Innocence Is No Longer a Roadblock to Parole
“'Parole commissioners, like the rest of society, have come to recognize
that there are far more innocent people in prison than we had ever
imagined, so they’re more receptive to that argument,' said Ron Kuby, a
civil rights lawyer who represents Mr. Moses."

BEACON,
N.Y. — After 28 years in prison, Freddie Cox emerged from the Fishkill
Correctional Facility, not quite a free man, but free enough.

A
sister had cued up Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” on her car’s CD
player, and, after hugs, Mr. Cox put his two small bags and his
typewriter in the car and squeezed in alongside the others, heading away
from prison, windows down.

Mr. Cox had been imprisoned for a
1986 murder in Coney Island, Brooklyn. He said then and he says now that
he is innocent — and he has maintained that position at four parole
hearings.

Three times, the parole board rejected Mr. Cox, even
though a co-defendant — who admitted to the murder, and has said Mr. Cox
was innocent — was granted parole three years ago.

The
predicament that had confronted Mr. Cox is known as the parole paradox:
Admitting guilt has historically given inmates a better shot at parole.
“Claiming to be innocent was, in the past, considered to be denial,”
said Daniel S. Medwed, a professor at Northeastern School of Law.

But
now, as New York and other states confront a growing number of
wrongful-conviction claims, lawyers, inmates and parole experts say the
beginnings of a change are occurring.

On his fourth try, Mr. Cox’s request was granted. Lawyers from the Exoneration Initiative
successfully petitioned this summer that there was enough evidence to
cast Mr. Cox’s guilt in question, and that his claim of innocence should
not be held against him.

Rebecca E. Freedman, one of his
lawyers, said they would soon ask a review unit created by the Brooklyn
district attorney to review his case.

At least three other men,
convicted in Brooklyn courts, have won their freedom despite not
admitting guilt: Derrick Hamilton, charged with a 1991
Bedford-Stuyvesant murder, got parole after 20 years in prison; Sundhe
Moses, who was convicted in a 1995 shooting that killed a 4-year-old
child, was granted parole last year; and Robert Hill, who was convicted of a 1988 murder, was granted parole in May.

“They’re
considering actual innocence,” said Tom Grant, a New York State parole
board member from 2004 to 2010. With DNA evidence and news media
coverage of wrongful convictions, he added, “you can justify a release
now.”

On the West Coast, men in California and Alaska who
maintained their innocence were granted parole this fall; lawyers in
those states said such decisions were exceedingly rare.

“Parole
commissioners, like the rest of society, have come to recognize that
there are far more innocent people in prison than we had ever imagined,
so they’re more receptive to that argument,” said Ron Kuby, a civil
rights lawyer who represents Mr. Moses.

In 2011, Mr. Moses made
his first appearance before the parole board. He said he had lied and
said he was guilty, and he expressed remorse in the hopes of gaining his
freedom. Parole was denied.

In his second appearance, Mr. Moses
gave the board various evidentiary problems with his conviction, and
proclaimed his innocence. Parole was granted.

The parole board’s
adjustment on Mr. Cox’s case is notable because his is not clear-cut:
There is no new DNA evidence, and there is still not a consistent take
on the events that led to Mr. Cox’s conviction — and a man’s death.

At
about 6 a.m. on New Year’s Day 1986, a 37-year-old man, Cornelius
Davis, was shot to death in an elevator in Coney Island. There was one
witness: Gloria Mack, a neighbor of his. She initially told the police
she had seen Mr. Cox, along with two others, Kelvin Green and Henry
James, at the murder scene, with Mr. Cox holding a gun and standing over
the victim.

The three were known to the police — they had
committed a robbery together in 1985. Mr. Cox pleaded guilty to
attempted robbery and said he spent a few months in jail.

When
questioned by the police about Mr. Davis, Mr. Cox, then 19, had an
alibi: He said he had celebrated New Year’s Eve with his girlfriend in
Times Square, where they watched “Rocky IV” and a ninja movie. They
ended up at her home around 4 a.m., and slept until 10 or 11 a.m.

Mr.
Green and Mr. James were soon arrested. They told similar stories: The
three had intended to rob Mr. Davis, but after things went awry, Mr. Cox
shot the victim. Mr. James would later testify, though, that he was
pressured to identify Mr. Cox.

By
trial, Ms. Mack, the sole witness, who had severe psychiatric problems
and was a self-described alcoholic, had changed key elements of her
story. She said she recalled four assailants, not three, and one was her
own son.

Then there was the presumed murder weapon, recovered
from the home of Mr. Cox’s girlfriend. It matched Ms. Mack’s description
of a long-barreled silver gun.

But the gun had no fingerprints,
and the ballistics expert at trial was not certain that it was the
murder weapon. Other physical evidence found at the scene — a hat, a
knife — also could not be linked to Mr. Cox.

The
jury convicted Mr. Cox of second-degree murder, criminal possession of a
weapon and robbery. He was sentenced to 25 years to life.

Mr.
Cox’s girlfriend at the time, Chantay Burnell, did not testify at the
trial. Reached in Pennsylvania, Ms. Burnell remembered the details of
that New Year’s night well: the movies, the sunrise, the B36 bus she and
Mr. Cox took back to Coney Island.

According to police reports,
Ms. Burnell had told detectives that Mr. Cox owned a gun. Mr. James and
Mr. Green came by on New Year’s Day morning to drop it off, she told the
police. She brought the police to her home and told them where the gun
was.

When informed of the police account, Ms. Burnell was incredulous.

“No. No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “That is not what happened.”

She said she had never seen Mr. Cox with a gun.

She
recalled that detectives at the precinct station house told her they
had a search warrant for her house, and that she had to go with them.

She
remembered standing downstairs in her townhouse during the three-hour
police search, punctuated by an officer’s shout of “Bingo” after he said
he found the gun.

Ms. Burnell said she always felt terrible about Mr. Cox’s conviction.

“I’ve always wondered, How did they convict him?” she said. “Now I see.”

Throughout
his prison term, Mr. Green continued to insist that he had killed Mr.
Davis and that Mr. Cox was not there. (Mr. James, for his part, said as
recently as 2012 that Mr. Cox was the gunman.)

Even at his trial, Mr. Green told the judge that “they already convicted Freddie Cox for it; but he didn’t do it — it was me.”

“He was there, wasn’t he?” the judge said.

“No. Nowhere around,” Mr. Green said.

Mr. Cox’s first chance at parole came in 2010.

“Do you take responsibility for these crimes?” a commissioner, Joseph P. Crangle, asked.

When
Mr. Cox said he was innocent, Mr. Crangle replied, “You were found
guilty, and we go on the facts that we have.” The commissioners denied
parole, and denied it two subsequent times.

Mr. Cox said he never
considered saying he was guilty because the murdered man had children.
“I don’t want anybody to think that I’m responsible for taking away
their parent,” he said.

Mr. Cox’s own parents, as well as a
brother and two sisters, died while he was in prison. He attended their
funerals in shackles and handcuffs, accompanied by prison guards.

Mr.
Cox tried to use his time productively. When he entered prison, he said
he could barely read and write. Over the years, he earned a high school
certificate and a college degree, studied Islam and counseled prisoners
about gun violence.

At Mr. Cox’s parole hearing this August, the mood had changed, as he discussed his innocence claim.

“I believe in justice and want to do what’s right,” a commissioner, Ellen Alexander, told him.

Parole was granted. The release was set for Oct. 15.

That day, just after 10 a.m., Mr. Cox emerged from the Fishkill prison.

He
is now 48 years old. He had not used a straw or chewed a piece of gum
in 28 years. He had never operated automatic car windows, or a
smartphone, or heard a computerized voice give driving directions. When
the group that had come to greet him stopped at a diner, he was amazed
by the luster of the plates, by the vibrancy of the salads, by the fact
that a waiter cleared away dirty items.

He was exuberant. But
parole is not freedom; parole is curfew. There are limitations to where
he can go, and a felony remains on his record.

Mr. Cox was
primarily concerned with the victim’s family. Once they know he is
innocent, he said, “that’s where my freedom really begins.”

As
they rode back to the city, Sam Cooke was still playing. Mr. Cox looked
out the window, distracted, as his sisters discussed a welcome-home
party.

“It’s been a long, long time coming,” Mr. Cooke sang. As
the greens and reds and auburns of the autumn Hudson Valley leaves
streamed by the window, Mr. Cox’s head fell forward into his hands and
he cried, silently, his shoulders shaking.

LYON,
France — Fabrice Moya, a chef with a boyish grin who opened a
restaurant by the same name here 12 years ago, has no problems with
doggie bags.

“We’ve always been used to letting people take what
they haven’t finished,” he said on a recent morning in his kitchen,
where several of his cooks were chopping carrots and filling buckets
with chickpeas for the day’s lunch service.

But it rarely happens
— one doggie bag per week at most, out of 500 customers, he estimated.
They were much more likely to take home what was left in their bottle of
wine.

“What’s important is to cook well,” Mr. Moya emphasized,
and an empty plate will follow. “If you do it with passion, people will
eat.”

That is not to say nothing is ever left behind. Though the
French remain resistant to taking leftovers home, a small movement is
afoot to change attitudes. It has been encouraged by difficult economic
times, rising consciousness about food waste, and an environmentally
minded younger generation that is more familiar with takeout culture.

As
part of a wider drive to cut down on food waste, the authorities in the
south-central region that includes Lyon started a campaign last month
to promote the use of doggie bags in local restaurants.

Though Lyon is not the only city in France to try such a campaign, its reputation as a culinary capital gives the drive a special resonance.

“Our
consumer study showed that while most consumers — a large majority —
favor encouraging this custom, most really hesitate to ask because they
are afraid of looking stingy,” said Elisabeth Manzon, who directs food
projects at the government agency running the campaign in the
Rhône-Alpes region. “They are ashamed.”

The agency formed a
partnership with restaurants like Mr. Moya’s, as well as with companies
and unions in the food and waste industries, providing free fliers and
stickers for download on a devoted website.

In
an attempt to rebrand the doggie bag in a more positive light, it is
using the term “gourmet bag” instead, with the tagline: “It’s so good,
I’ll finish it at home!”

One flier shows a sketch of a man
raising his hand in a restaurant to ask for a doggie bag. The caption
reads: “Who said I was a cheapskate? No, I’m just an eco-gastronomist!”

Still, there is a long way to go to overcome French prejudices about taking home leftovers, rooted in history and culture.

Jean-Pierre
Corbeau, a sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of
Tours who specializes in food, said both upper and lower classes
traditionally shunned the idea.

For the working classes, leaving
food on one’s plate was a waste; for the bourgeoisie, it was a sign that
you were wealthy enough not to scarf everything down.

But for some, the French are merely turning their noses up at something they used to do much more often.

Jean Terlon, vice president of the food branch of the Union of Hospitality Trades and Industries, France’s
main union in the food and service industry, and a promoter of the
gourmet bag campaign, said the custom used to be more common in the
mid-20th century.

“They didn’t hesitate to ask for leftovers from
an unfinished dish,” he said of people in his childhood. “It was
something that used to be done, and now the French are struck by
snobbery, and they don’t ask anymore.”

But Mr. Corbeau, the
sociologist, said this early version of the doggie bag was often used in
a family setting, and was sometimes geared toward poorer segments of
society, a context that helps explain the negative connotations.

“You
might be perceived and stigmatized as a poor person looking for a
handout,” he said, recalling how people would ring at the door for a
small donation of food when his grandmother organized big meals. “It was
a premature doggie bag, for beggars.”

Even today, taking
leftovers home conflicts with France’s attitude toward eating out, and
the general impression that the doggie bag is more of an American
phenomenon — a result of supersize portions.

“Contrary to the
image we have of France, the country of gastronomy, where people
supposedly spend all their time at the restaurant, people don’t eat out
that often,” said Anne Lhuissier, a sociologist at the French National
Institute for Agricultural Research who has studied eating habits and
food consumption in France.

She noted that the French spent more
time than their European neighbors on preparing and eating their own
meals. “And when they do eat out,” Ms. Lhuissier said, “they relish it.”

Dining
out is thus a rare experience, to be enjoyed in situ, not bundled up in
plastic foam containers and reheated in the microwave.“If you are
dealing with finer things, things that are tastier, then maybe you have
more appetite, and more pleasure in finishing your plate,” said Thibault
Narmand, who owns a cozy bistro with his wife, Faten, in Lyon.

Other
chefs, including Mr. Moya, seemed to agree. Few opposed the idea of the
doggie bag in principle, but they emphasized that if portions were well
sized, if the dishes were tasty and if the dining experience was
enjoyable, then there should be no need to take anything back home.

“If
all your tables are leaving with doggie bags, you have a quantity
problem in your plates,” said Wilfried Champin, the headwaiter at Tapeo,
a Spanish-influenced restaurant that overlooks the Saône River in a
sleek new mall in Lyon.

As a customer in other restaurants, Mr.
Champin is sometimes taken aback by how foreign the concept seems to his
colleagues in the catering industry. “Once a restaurant owner looked at
me and asked, ‘Why on earth would I do a doggie bag?’ ” he said.

Some
chefs mistakenly fear that they will be legally responsible for food
poisoning from a spoiled doggie bag, a worry the campaign wants to
dispel.

Others insisted that the doggie bag was a solution to a
problem that barely existed here. If the authorities really want to
tackle the problem of food waste, they should look elsewhere, they said.

Households
and manufacturers account for a much larger portion of food waste,
which the European Parliament voted two years ago to halve by 2025. The
European Commission estimates that while 100 million tons of food is
wasted annually in the European Union, only 14 percent of that is from
the catering sector.

Even Ms. Manzon admitted that the end goal
of her agency’s campaign is to reduce waste altogether, not to promote
the doggie bag, per se. “Certainly we want to encourage the gourmet bag,
but the main message we want to convey is that, if the plate can be
finished, it’s better,” she said.

Indeed, finishing one’s plate
is something of a French institution. In Lyon, at La Tête de Lard, a
traditional “bouchon” restaurant that serves regional dishes like potato
or macaroni gratin, the chef and owner, Yoann Blanc, said he jokingly
chides his customers that if they don’t finish their main dish, they
won’t get any dessert.

In many ways, the doggie bag was much better in theory than in practice, and certainly remained alien to some.

Outside
Brasserie Georges, a stalwart of traditional French cuisine in Lyon,
21-year-old Arthur Pascal lighted a cigarette after an afternoon meal
with his family. He knew all about doggie bags, and liked the idea.

“But
I rarely ask for one,” he admitted, because it just is not something
you do. The only time his family did ask, they returned home with meat
bones — not for them, but for their dogs.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

7) Decades of Neglect Show Starkly as Indian Schools Cry Out for Repairs

BENA,
Minn. — When temperatures drop and snow falls, students bundle
themselves in heavy coats inside Marlene Stately’s classroom. Winter
comes early and bites hard on this Indian reservation in northern
Minnesota, and the pole barn that houses part of the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig
School offers limited protection from the elements.

“I think we
need a new school,” Ms. Stately said last month after her upper-grade
students had practiced introducing themselves in the Ojibwe language.
“It’s cold here in the wintertime. They’re not comfortable. And how can
you learn when you’re freezing?”In the federal Bureau of Indian
Education system, the dreadful facilities of Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig — named
for a late member of the tribe — are far from unique. The network of
about 185 congressionally funded schools in 23 states is in the midst of
a broad overhaul, but decades of neglect have left reservations with
schools where students struggle to meet academic standards, turnover
among educators is high and the buildings are often in decay.

Students
at Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig speak highly of their teachers — the school is
“like a family,” said Terrance Warner, a senior who plans to join the
Army after graduation — and administrators work to ingrain Ojibwe
culture in the curriculum. Still, school leaders say, there is a toll
taken by the chilly classrooms and the poorly ventilated science lab
where students cannot conduct experiments.

“If the kids are going
into a school with a leaky roof and a bad smell, that’s a value thing,
that nobody cares,” said Crystal Redgrave, the superintendent of
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, who said she suspected the condition of the building
had contributed to a steep drop in enrollment, which is now about 200
students. “But if they go to a well-equipped school, they’d see people
really do care.”

Officials at the United States Department of the Interior,
which oversees the bureau, say they are working to improve schools like
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig. But with limited funding and a huge backlog of
repairs — the government estimates that it would cost $1.3 billion to
restore all buildings to good condition — some administrators and
students wonder when they will see the fruits of those policies.

“I
think everyone agrees that our children deserve better, but these are
tough budget times and it’s difficult,” said Charles Roessel, the
director of the Indian education bureau. “It’s a priority for us.”

The bureau’s challenges extend far beyond bricks and mortar.

On
a national reading assessment in 2011, fourth graders at the bureau’s
schools scored 22 points lower on a 500-point scale than their Native
American peers in other public schools, a scathing review from the
federal Government Accountability Office found. In addition to
consistently poor test scores, the report highlighted a subpar
graduation rate and confusing layers of bureaucracy that create a
disconnect between national policy and classrooms.

Secretary of
the Interior Sally Jewell has ordered a restructuring that seeks to
shift the federal role from creating curriculum and directly
administering far-flung schools to providing support and funding to
local leaders who would call the shots. The hope, she said, is to shore
up facilities and give the schools the means to teach culturally
relevant lessons and improve their academics.

That tribe-first
approach is vital to turning around the schools, said William Mendoza,
who is leading a White House initiative to improve education of Native
Americans. “We’ve tried just about everything in education except enlist
the tribes to affect their own school systems in a more positive way,”
said Mr. Mendoza, who is Oglala-Sicangu Lakota and attended bureau
schools as a child in South Dakota, then taught in them. “That’s the
important component.”

Like about two-thirds of bureau schools,
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig is operated by a local school board authorized by the
tribe, known as the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Ms. Jewell’s order calls
for shifting the remaining 60 or so schools to tribal oversight, and
providing more efficient funding and support for the entire system. For
schools that are already administered locally, the changes could lead to
more resources like expanded teacher training or broadband
installation.

Skepticism of Washington reformers permeates many
reservations, where the federal government’s fraught history of
educating Native American children has left a painful legacy. For
decades, national policy sought to strip the children of their culture
and language in an effort to “Westernize” them. Those efforts were
disavowed long ago, but many federally run Indian schools have continued
to struggle. Ms. Jewell, who visited Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig in August, said
that in an effort to build trust, she listens closely but does not offer
guarantees when meeting with tribal leaders.

“What I told them
is ‘I’m not going to promise you anything because I don’t control the
budget,’ ” said Ms. Jewell, who pledged to use what she saw and heard in
Minnesota to prod Congress for more funds. Historically, the
reservation schools have not been a top priority for lawmakers.

“It’s
not like going to a school board,” said Don Yu, a special adviser to
the education secretary who is working with the Interior Department on
improving Indian schools. “We have to go to senators and congressmen and
ask them for this funding. Getting funding for new major infrastructure
problems has been extremely challenging.”

At Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig,
students and staff members talk excitedly about the prospect of a new
building. About three years ago, school officials and tribal elders
worked with architects to create a plan for a new high school, complete
with a culture room and gymnasium, that could cost about $25 million.

John
Parmeter, a longtime teacher at Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig who now oversees
security and other administrative duties, said the need for a new high
school becomes especially apparent when snow piles up on the roof,
requiring heavy equipment for repairs, or when it melts and trash cans
must be stationed throughout the building to catch water dripping from
the ceiling.

The building is not safe, Mr. Parmeter said, and the
situation is not fair. Still, he documents every hazard and maintenance
problem, hoping to eventually persuade federal officials to do more.
“They just keep patching something that’s beyond patching,” Mr. Parmeter
said.

WASHINGTON
— The nation’s largest organization of psychologists will conduct an
independent review into whether it colluded with or supported the
government’s use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners during the
Bush administration.

The American Psychological Association said in a statement released late Wednesday that its board had named David H. Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer, to conduct the review.

For
years, questions about the role of American psychologists and
behavioral scientists in the development and implementation of the
Bush-era interrogation program have been raised by human rights
advocates as well as by critics within the psychological profession
itself. Psychologists were involved in developing the enhanced
interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Later, a number of psychologists, in the military and in the
intelligence community, were involved in carrying out and monitoring
interrogations.In an interview, Mr. Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor
and onetime inspector general of the city of Chicago, emphasized the
independence of his investigation. “We will go wherever the evidence
leads,” he said.

Some longtime critics praised the move by the
group. “The A.P.A.’s action is a long-needed step toward an independent
review of their post-9/11 activities,” said Stephen Soldz,
a professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. “It is
vital that this review be fully independent and comprehensive in
nature.”

Critics like Mr. Soldz have said that the participation
of psychologists allowed the Bush administration to argue that the
interrogations did not constitute torture because they and other
behavioral scientists were monitoring the interrogations to make sure
they remained “safe, legal and effective.” Psychiatrists were not as
willing to cooperate with the interrogation programs.

In
particular, the critics have cited the association’s 2002 decision to
modify its ethics rules that in effect gave greater professional cover
to psychologists who had been helping to monitor and oversee
interrogations.

The most important change was a new guideline
that made it clear that if a psychologist faced a conflict between the
A.P.A.’s ethics code and a lawful order, the psychologist could follow
the law. Critics say this introduced the Nuremberg defense into American
psychology — following orders was an acceptable reason to violate
professional ethics.

“It’s sad that the A.P.A., rather than
protecting its members from engaging in interrogation activities, bent
its rules to allow their participation in those interrogations,” Mr.
Soldz said.

The association has long defended the profession’s
activities as well as itself against critics who have questioned whether
the organization helped make it easier for psychologists to remain
involved with the government’s interrogation program, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal set off a public debate about the program.

In
its statement, the association said that its decision to appoint an
independent reviewer was prompted by questions raised about the
relationship between the psychological profession and the government
agencies involved in the torture program in the new book, “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War,” by this reporter.

The
book uses the email archive of Scott Gerwehr, a behavioral researcher
with ties to the C.I.A. and other agencies who died in 2008, to provide a
glimpse at the network of psychologists, academic researchers,
contractors and intelligence and Pentagon officials who formed the
behavioral science infrastructure that grew up after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks to support the Bush administration’s war on terror.

Most
notable, the emails reveal that after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in
2004, the association was eager to get out in front of the controversy
by developing new professional guidelines for psychologists involved in
interrogations. The group created a committee to study the matter, and
in 2005 issued a report that, in effect, enabled psychologists involved
in the Bush interrogation program to continue. A number of psychologists
and human rights advocates have been critical of the work of that
committee, known as the PENS Task Force, ever since.

Mr.
Gerwehr’s emails show for the first time the degree to which behavioral
science experts from within the government’s national security apparatus
played roles in shaping the outcome of the A.P.A. task force. The
emails show that in July 2004, just months after the graphic photos of
abuse at Abu Ghraib were publicly disclosed, association officials
convened a private meeting of psychologists who worked at the C.I.A.,
the Pentagon and other national security agencies to provide input on
how the association should deal with the “unique ethical issues” raised
for psychologists in the wake of the Abu Ghraib disclosures.

After
the A.P.A. task force effectively endorsed the continued involvement of
psychologists in the interrogation program, one association official
wrote, in an email on which Mr. Gerwehr was copied, that he wanted to
thank an intelligence official for helping to influence the outcome of
the task force. “Your views were well represented by very carefully
selected task force members,” the A.P.A. official wrote.

The
association’s statement suggested, however, that Mr. Hoffman’s
investigation would range far more widely than the relatively narrow
questions raised by Mr. Gerwehr’s emails detailed in the book.

The
former chief executive of the company involved in the nation’s worst
coal mine disaster in 40 years, in which 29 men died in West Virginia in
2010, was charged on Thursday with widespread violations of safety
rules and deceiving federal inspectors.

The
disaster, the deadliest in the nation since 1970, has left painful
scars even in a state that has long accepted mining’s toll on life and
health, and which celebrates coal as part of its identity. As recently
as the elections last week, candidates in House and Senate races boasted
of how quickly they had rushed to the Upper Big Branch site four years
ago.

Mr. Blankenship, who retired about eight months after the
disaster, is well known in the state, where he has donated to
conservative political candidates, even as victims’ families have called
for his prosecution. Through a lawyer, he maintained his innocence.
“Don Blankenship has been a tireless advocate for mine safety,” the
lawyer, William W. Taylor III, said in a statement. “His outspoken
criticism of powerful bureaucrats has earned this indictment. He will
not yield to their effort to silence him.”

Senator Jay
Rockefeller of West Virginia had an unusually sharp reaction. “As he
goes to trial, he will be treated far fairer and with more dignity than
he ever treated the miners he employed,” he said. “And, frankly, it’s
more than he deserves.”

Several investigations have found that
Massey routinely ignored safety violations at the mine. The 2011 federal
investigation by the mine safety agency concluded that the explosion
was preventable and issued 369 citations. Alpha Natural Resources, which
bought Massey in 2011, paid $209 million in criminal penalties to
settle with the Department of Justice. Two subordinates of Mr.
Blankenship, including a former superintendent of the Upper Big Branch
mine, have pleaded guilty in criminal cases. Mr. Blankenship faces a
maximum of 31 years’ imprisonment.

The charges hold him
personally responsible for the hundreds of safety violations in 28
months leading up to the explosion. They included failing to ventilate
coal dust and methane, which are highly explosive, and failing to water
down equipment to prevent sparks that could ignite an explosion.

According
to the indictment, Mr. Blankenship’s aggressive enforcement of mining
quotas left workers no time to build ventilation systems “because
constructing them diverted time from coal production.” He denied a
request to build an air shaft in a mine where airflow was below the
legal minimum, the indictment said. He also cut the number of miners
focusing on safety in order to make the operation more profitable.

Mr.
Blankenship was charged with authorizing a “scheme” of warnings to
miners underground when federal safety inspectors made surprise visits.
By using “code words and phrases,” word was passed by telephone from a
guardhouse to a mine office to supervisors deep underground, who ordered
miners “to quickly cover up violations” before inspectors arrived, the
indictment said.

Besides charges of conspiracy to violate safety
laws and defrauding the federal government, the four-count indictment
included a charge of securities fraud and a charge of making false
statements to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

The
president of the United Mine Workers of America, Cecil E. Roberts,
hailed the indictment. “The carnage that was a recurring nightmare at
Massey mines during Blankenship’s tenure at the head of that company was
unmatched,” he said.

CLAYTON,
Mo. — The forensic pathologist hired by the family of Michael Brown
testified before a St. Louis County grand jury on Thursday, an
indication that the proceedings might be nearing their final stages, the
family’s lawyers said.

The lawyers said they believed that grand
jurors had asked to hear from the pathologist, Dr. Michael M. Baden,
during a process that the family and its supporters have criticized as
lacking the transparency needed to engender confidence in the system.

Mr.
Brown, 18, who was black, was shot and killed three months ago by
Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in nearby Ferguson. Mr. Brown was
unarmed, and some witnesses said he had his arms up in surrender at the
time. The shooting incited days of sometimes violent protest. The grand
jury is expected to decide soon whether to indict Officer Wilson.

The
Brown family lawyers, Benjamin Crump and Anthony D. Gray, would not go
into the details of Dr. Baden’s testimony. But they did disclose that
the pathologist had reclassified a wound to Mr. Brown’s chest as an
entry wound. The significance of that change was unclear, and the
lawyers declined to elaborate.

Speaking to reporters in front of
the county justice center here, Mr. Gray said that regardless of whether
the grand jury decides to indict Mr. Wilson, the Brown family wanted to
reiterate Gov. Jay Nixon’s “denouncement of violence, looting and
rioting in the name of Michael Brown.”

“We want to encourage all
of those that support the justice for Mike Brown to remain vigilant, yet
peaceful, calm and dignified as we await and after we receive the
announcement of the grand jury decision,” Mr. Gray added.

But the
lawyers went farther than the governor, also admonishing law
enforcement officers to allow protesters to exercise their rights.

“History
is clear,” Mr. Gray said. “Prior to many uncivilized reactions by
demonstrators, they were simply exercising their First Amendment right,
during which time they became victims of assault rifles being pointed in
their face, being manhandled, being tear gassed, hit by rubber bullets,
falsely arrested. Law enforcement should have been equally condemned by
the governor for this conduct at the same time he was admonishing the
demonstrators.”

In a news conference this week, Governor Nixon
said he would mobilize all the law enforcement officers necessary to
keep the peace, including the National Guard.

It remains unclear
when the grand jury will reach its decision. The jurors have been
hearing evidence for months. Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County
prosecutor, has said he expected a decision by mid- to late November.
Meanwhile, many people in the St. Louis area have been on edge, fearing
that the grand jury decision could reignite violence.

Mr.
McCulloch has said that prosecutors were presenting all of the evidence
to the grand jury. When Dr. Baden released his initial autopsy in
August, he said that Mr. Brown had been shot at least six times, with
none of the shots appearing to be from very close range. News reports of
the autopsy performed by the St. Louis County medical examiner said
that Mr. Brown had a wound on his thumb that could have come during an
encounter with Officer Wilson at his car.

Regardless of what
evidence is placed before the grand jury, Mr. Gray said, the fact that
it was being done behind closed doors was problematic.

“What we’re missing would be how that information was presented,” he said. “What emphasis was placed on what piece of evidence.”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

11) Shift on Marijuana Policy Was a Long Time Coming, and Too Late for One Man
By JIM DWYER

Anthony
Welfare closely followed this week’s news that New York City no longer
will bring criminal charges against people who are seen with small
amounts of marijuana, as long as they are not smoking it in public.

“I find that funny,” Mr. Welfare, 28, said.

But not hah-hah funny.

Not LOL funny.

After
seven years of steady work, Mr. Welfare automatically lost his job as a
school bus driver in August when a police officer swore under oath that
he saw a pipe in the center console of a car in which Mr. Welfare was a
passenger. The pipe had a residue of marijuana, the officer said.

Therefore,
everyone in the car — the driver and his passenger, Mr. Welfare — was
openly displaying marijuana, a misdemeanor.Mayor Bill de Blasio and
Police Commissioner William J. Bratton on Monday said police officers
would no longer file misdemeanor charges against people who displayed
small amounts of marijuana in public. Instead, the officers would charge
them with merely possessing the pot, a violation, which is like getting
a traffic ticket.

The difference is not trivial. The ticket
would not have cost Mr. Welfare a job that paid him about $40,000 a
year. He was arrested on Aug. 16, the first time he had ever had any
trouble with the law. That was a Saturday. By Monday, the bus company he
worked for had been notified, and he was fired on the spot. His
experience was chronicled last month
in this column. (At the time, Mr. Welfare asked that his last name not
be revealed.) Since then, the charge against him has been dismissed and
his record is once again clean. But he has not yet been able to regain
his old job, and to date, he has lost nearly $10,000 in wages.

“Now the change goes into effect — after what I just been through,” Mr. Welfare said.

For
the most part, the policy change won’t affect white pot users, who were
not likely to be stopped and told to turn out their pockets, or to be
accused of openly displaying marijuana — or its residue — in the center
console of a car. Pot in someone’s pocket is mere possession, not a
crime; having it in the open is a misdemeanor. Tricking people into
displaying it was called manufacturing misdemeanors. For much of Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, such misdemeanor marijuana
arrests took place at the rate of one every 12 minutes, or 50,000 a
year. Overwhelmingly, those charged were black, like Mr. Welfare, or
Latino. Most had never been in trouble with the law.

Mr.
Bloomberg and his aides scoffed at the notion that the arrests were a
big deal, saying most of those cases were dismissed and sealed. Indeed,
that is what happened with Mr. Welfare’s case — after he was fired. A
pot charge can cost people jobs that require clean criminal records,
like security guards for city and state agencies, or home health care
attendants. For immigrants, there can be other harrowing consequences: A
Liberian man was held in an immigration jail for a year pending
deportation on a marijuana case before the charge was downgraded, said
Mitch Briskey, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society.

How did this
go on so long? Part of it, Mr. Bratton said, is that a large number of
public complaints come to the police about open pot dealing or smoking.

But there is more. During the stop-and-frisk
era, police precincts set numerical goals for “activity” by officers, a
standard management productivity tool in all lines of work. It was an
article of faith that the stops would help drive down crime. But the
numbers became an end unto themselves, a toxic force propelling a
machine that devoured the people it was supposed to keep safe.

Millions
of searches yielded only a tiny amount of criminality — and a majority
of it was the spuriously manufactured public displays of marijuana. Now
that the searches have been curtailed, crime has continued to drop.

The
Bronx Defenders, which represents poor people, tried in 2012 to fight
the marijuana arrests on the grounds that the searches were illegal. In
54 test cases, which lasted an average of eight months, not once were
they able to get a hearing before the cases were dismissed anyway.

For
Mr. Welfare, contesting the search would have kept the case open and
delayed the possibility of his return to work, said his lawyer, Marquita
Johnson of the Legal Aid Society.

No single rogue committed an
overt act of bigotry to create a grotesque separate regimen of
punishment for blacks and Latinos. The racism was mixed into the
concrete that held up the system. It richly deserves the sledgehammer
that Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton are now swinging.